CowboyRobot writes: "This month is the 60th anniversary of magnetic tape as a data storage medium, and many companies (most of which did not exist when IBM developed the first tape drive) are realizing that the main complaints about tape are no longer relevant."The three biggest complaints about tape — that data is hard to find, might then be hard to read, and the media is generally unreliable — no longer hold water. The vendors emphasize that tape has become much easier to manage and use via automated health- and data-integrity verification tools. Thanks to file systems such as LTFS, tapes can look and act like enormous USB drives. Most surprising is the revelation that the raw bit error rate of tape is orders of magnitude better than that of most disk drives.""